Tuesday, October 02, 2007

On the face of it, the book bag would appear to be a most elegant solution to the question, "how shall I carry my school books?" The old style satchel or even rucksack was heavy, ungainly and gave every single solitary user a hump, you see. Its benefits include its colour-scheme & logo fitting in with uniform to give all children a pleasing conformity.

But in fact it creates more questions than it ultimately answers, such as "how shall I carry my lunch", "where shall I put my snack", "is it wise to put my water bottle in with my homework" and "can you carry my coat, Mum"?

And the conformity value is defenestrated when children end up carrying a worrying array of different sizes of bag and sundries in a rainbow of colours as well as said book bag. I had to stop and help a little girl who was carrying about 16 million bags this very morning, as she was very late and very over-loaded.*

I purchased a rucksack for S into which her bookbag fits. Which undercuts the whole purpose of book bags, I presume, but never mind...

*Yes, I did very much over-use the word very in that very sentence. Very sorry.

1 comment:

Kids have way too much to carry to school these days - I'm sure I didn't have loads of books and bits to carry until I got to secondary school. I'm positive it's not good for them to carry all of these things around.